Last Day on the Iron Range...

Monday (Lexy's birthday) was our last day on the Iron Range...a drive day back...we had already celebrated Lex's birthday and presents were waiting when we got back, but we had a few more stops to make after leaving the park...

First up was a short stop at the 36-foot Iron Man statue, a memorial for iron miners in Chisholm...

Then we went to Virginia, to see the highest bridge (just over 200 feet high) in the state of Minnesota.  It crosses the old Roucheleau mine pit and opened in September of 2017.  The Mesabi Trail also uses the bridge, so you can walk out onto the bridge...

The Roucheleau pit merges with other pits to the north and together, ore was mined from these pits for over a hundred years (1893-1997)...

That wind was whipping through the bars on the bridge...

There's an interesting story why the bridge was built.  Back in 1960, Minnesota made an agreement with US Steel to allow them to build a road (US 53) across mine lands.  US Steel maintained the mineral rights under the road.  Per the agreement, if the company needed to mine the land under the road before prior to 1987, the cost to move the road would be on US Steel.  The cost to move the road would fall to the state if it was after 1987.  In about 2010, Cleveland Cliffs (which had taken over the mineral rights from US Steel), notified the state they needed to mine the land under the road.

The problem is that in that area, there are only so many places to put a road without hitting an active mine or old mine pit.  After lots of time and money spent, the decision was made to build the bridge...

 After the bridge, we went to Gilbert to see a 'classic' example of pillowed greenstone.  Greenstone is a metamorphic rock.  It was originally basalt (cooled lava) that was metamorphosed to greenstone.  Pillows, these rounded structures in the greenstone (originally basalt), occur when lava erupts underneath an ocean (think Hawaii today)...

The greenstone is 2.7 billion years old.  How do we know that?  It's science.  The same thing that has confirmed that humans are rapidly warming the Earth's climate by releasing stored CO2 by burning fossil fuels, at a pace that earth systems cannot keep up, causing repercussions that are currently occurring and those are going to get worse.  Yep, science...

One other cool exposure on this 2.7 billion-year-old rock is this small sample of reddish rock.  That rock is part of the Biwabik Iron Formation (currently being mined) that the glaciers could not remove during the last ice ages.  The Biwabik is between 1.8-1.9 billion-years-old.  Meaning at the contact of the two, there is a difference of 800 million years!

See...we're learning...even on a travel day...

It was a good day...

McCarthy Beach State Park...

We ended up camping for a couple of nights at McCarthy Beach State Park, a new park for us.  It's north of Hibbing by about twenty miles.  After a busy day of learning about the mining industry, we were ready to set up camp and relax, at least I was ready to relax...

We got camp set up, I was tired, but they wanted to go check out the park...specifically the beach...we didn't swim, but they would the next day...

After walking back from the beach, I figured I could relax in the hammock...wrong...

We finished the night off with marshmallows...

Lex had a hard time with this one...see the one on the left?  It's burning and would ignite the one on the right...

After breakfast the next day, we went off on the 'hiking club' hike.  It was a three mile hike, plus another mile to get to the start of the hike, so about five miles total.  On the way, we found a couple of deer...

Obviously, the above picture I zoomed in some...

We finally got to the trailhead...Lex really wanted that long-sleeved sweatshirt along...eventually, she regretted it...

Whenever we get to a location were the trail is telling you to go one direction, Lukie likes to go the opposite direction (which is what he's showing here)...he figures that the recommended way will take longer to get to the password, so he wants to got the short way...

Part of the hike took us along a nice lake...and we had the entire area to ourselves, we saw two people total on the hike, near the end...

Best part of the hike?  At open areas on the lakeshore, we found blueberries!

Snacks are good when hiking...blueberries are better...

But for this hike, Lukie and I will remember the horse and deer flies...when we turned away from the lake, they swarmed the two of us for the better part of a mile...

They pretty much ignored Lex's blond hair...until the moment I took this picture...we found the password and one of the flies found Lex...

Like I said, it was a new park for us and a new stamp for the passport...

After the long hike, we walked across the road and got some ice cream...we ate it alongside the lake...

I was ready for a nap...they were ready to swim...I lost...

But Lukie spent a long time building a 'fortress' that was under attack.  If you ask him, he could describe everything in this picture...

After we walked back to camp, I was ready for some rest...then Lukie decides 'hey, let's go geocaching!'  Walk back to the office to get their pre-loaded GPS devices and we were off...

There were 6-7 stops loaded on the GPS, each one taking us to another clue...

I just followed along as Lukie and Lex followed the GPS...

From clue to clue...

Until they finally found the cache...

The reward was a card of a leopard frog...the MN State Parks geocache program this summer has a water theme...it was our first time doing this at a state park and I'm sure we'll be doing it again...

After returning the GPS back to the office and walking back to camp, I was ready to rest...look at numbers on my watch for that day alone (and it was only 6:26 pm)...

I figured I was due for some quality time in the hammock...I was wrong...

We ended that night just like the night before, making s'mores...

When the sun went down, I figured I could rest in the hammock...wrong again...Lex had set up shop...

She didn't spend the whole night in the hammock, but long enough...it was the tent again and finally some rest after a long day...

MN Iron Mining...

On the way to our campsite last weekend, we made a couple of stops to learn about iron mining in Minnesota, historical and current.  Our first stop was at Hill Annex State Park, mining took place at the location from 1913 until 1978.  It was made a state park in 1988.

They give two tours at the park, both lasting for about an hour and a half.  One is the historic mine tour and the other is a fossil hunt looking for Cretaceous-aged fossils.  Anything you find, you can keep.  Of the handful of confirmed dinosaur fossils found in Minnesota, most have come from Hill Annex.

The historic mine tour loads you onto a bus to drive you through the old mine.  Inside everything is a dusty red, from previous visitors and when given the option to sit, of course Lukie and Lex chose the back...

At one stop, the tour guide (an older worker while the mine was active) discussed the geology of what they were mining.  After he was done (and everyone went to look at the sites), I had to correct some of the big mistakes that he said for Lukie and Lex...

Theres some of the old equipment that you can climb on and look around...

The picture below was taken after our 'corrected geology of the area' talk...

I also had to fix another item the guide said.  He was talking about the overburden (the stuff deposited on top of the iron formation) and said their was convincing evidence 'two world-views' that would explain the overburden.  First, "geologists explain it as being material deposited by glaciers" (in fact, in some of this overburden you can find Lake Superior agates).  The second world-view has evidence for "the material to be deposited by a great flood."  He was strongly implying the flood was Noah's Flood and one family immediately jumped on board with it.  From across the pit, you could see the overburden contained huge boulders and other sediments down to sand-grained or smaller.  I pointed that out to the guide and said that water sorts sediments by size (unless it's a tsunami event, and that's not a tsunami event located here), even in floods whereas glaciers deposit unsorted material in the form of glacial till.  He countered with 'the fact that there was great evidence of being deposited by a flood' but was unwilling to explain his evidence.  I again pointed out that Lake Superior agates are deposited from Minnesota all the way to Kansas due to glaciers picking them up the Lake Superior area and depositing them elsewhere.  He stopped talking and walked away...

Even though glaciers were responsible for the overburden, humans did do a massive amount of work mining that made a big pit, now filled with water...

Near the museum, you can get into one of the other buckets, which Lukie and Lex thought were big...more on that later...

Inside the museum, the lower level discusses how mining occurred in the area and the geology.  What caught their attention was the fossils found there...above Lex's right shoulder is an ammonite.  They were related to a squid or octopus, which went extinct at the same time of the dinosaurs.  I was there about a month earlier and someone in my group found an ammonite that was about 10 inches across.  Lukie really wants to do the fossil hunt this summer, we didn't have time this trip...

The museum has a great geological column representing the rock layers starting below the iron formation to the surface...if you click on the picture, maybe you'll be able to read the top layer identified as 'glacial drift'...the tour guide should read the material in his own museum...

The upper level has converted the rooms to look like what rooms of the area would've looked like in the period...engineers, geologist, professionals, iron miners, school rooms, etc...

Lukie and Lex both said how big that pit is....

On the way to the state park we'd be camping at, we stopped in Hibbing to look at HibbTac's active pit.  The old mine view was closed a few years ago because the company needed to mine in that area, so at the end of May this year, they opened a new mine view...

It didn't take them long to realize the scale of current mining operations doesn't compare to older operations...

I liked how this sign does a nice job of describing how iron is moved from the area to the mills on the lower lakes...

Lukie really wanted to take this for a drive...

The Hull-Rust pit is huge...the equipment is even bigger...I've been in this pit 2-3 times (was in it just a month prior) and have had haul trucks drive by the coach buses we're in...the size of the bus compared to the truck is not comparable...

The both enjoyed watching the trucks do their work from a distance, and as the mine view was closing, we took off...

A short twenty minutes later, we were setting up camp...